


Hide the Stars

by daredevilmoon



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 03:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2176353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daredevilmoon/pseuds/daredevilmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a walk, Sybil finds a strange thing gives her hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hide the Stars

The stars above her seemed to speak of life - each burning and flickering for each man in turn, leaving Sybil to wonder distantly whether those numbering the dying winked into dark as they did. If the light faded as their bodies were being taken away and tended to, collected. A thing like this War, then, would begin to blot the heroes scattered through the star; one night the world would look up to find that scales had fallen from the sky. Who would rush to end the War as the night was inked and the stars forgotten?

Still, too, life surrounded her in the smells of the grass and the tree, the soft sound of the chirping of crickets, the feel of the crisp air. There was, in this, an unfading sort of honesty of life beyond the walls of the hospital, even if such a thing seemed to no longer be found in the hearts of men.

As Sybil walked the grounds, path lighted by the glow of the moon, her thoughts drifted back to the times she had spent in the gardens as a child, running off from Fraulein Kelder at any opportunity in order to hide among the flowers. She thought perhaps she had even then yearned for a life more vibrant; the flowers in the halls would never have suited her purposes, she realised. She had wanted a sense of the real - the life existing without artifice beyond the walls of the abbey, beyond the polite dinner banter - and it had taken her a War to find it, but find it she had. A reality far more grim than anything she had imagined; she knew that it wouldn’t break her, but she found herself hardened for that.

It had, at first, frightened her. Then, slowly, she realised what she was becoming, rather than cold or any other such absurd notions, a person unto herself to a greater degree than she could have imagined even a few short years ago. It gave her the strength of determination behind her ideals and she felt herself becoming stronger as she became fulfilled.

Sybil smiled to herself in the darkness as she continued on, letting a soft huff of contentment pour forth as she caught sight of two men sitting on the bench in the distance. The light was enough that she could make out their silhouettes rather than any distinguishing features, but she knew all the same that it was Corporal Barrow and Lieutenant Courtenay. If nothing else, they were almost certainly the only men from the hospital who could have ventured so far afield.

Their shoulders were pressed together as they spoke and Sybil lingered a while where she was; they were all on friendly terms, but often the men preferred to not speak of the details of the war with women around. As though these same women hadn’t tended to men torn apart by shrapnel, with parts of themselves missing, men who wept for their mother when they died. The idea niggled at her some, but she remained as she was, watching the two men.

She never thought she’d be so glad of Corporal Barrow as she had grown; he’d never been rude to her, per se, but he carried himself in a way which she found borderline unpleasant before she knew him. Yet, from the beginning, he was the only person who seemed entirely capable of handling Courtenay.

The nurses had all grown slightly afraid of the prospect of tending to him, because, unlike a fair few of the others, he was fully cognizant and quite prepared to be unkind if it struck him as fitting. He always seemed to be on the precipice of temper and if he was jarred by the slightest thing, he would inevitably lash out. Fortunately, Barrow, when he had begun to help Courtenay, had never seemed particularly troubled by his behaviour, and while Dr Clarkson had the tendency to regard Courtenay with some annoyance, Barrow would often specifically go out of his way to speak with him. For that, for his companionship, Courtenay had seemed quite improved from his arrival. He would still snap at nurses on occasion, but none had been made to cry, which Sybil counted as a victory.

She made to approach the men, a sudden burst of affection for them flowering in her, when she was stopped short by a curious sight indeed: a kiss. For that was unmistakably what it was. She felt a little jolt of surprise, which hadn’t as yet entirely registered when to broke apart.

There had been a warning by one of the nurses in training that men took great passion in all things after a battle, for the pleasure of being alive. She was informed that the men might speak of great love for one another, but that it meant nothing untoward. It was a love, she had been told, borne purely of battle.

She hadn’t then, but now she wondered whether that was always the case. Barrow didn’t seem particularly fond of any of the other men; he would do exactly as he was meant and stop, not counting fraternisation as one of his tasks. He was no better with the nurses, either; it was all perfectly above-board in the realms of decency, but Barrow was certainly not anyone she would have ever classified as particularly passionate with his compatriots. None but Courtenay; Sybil suddenly found herself wondering whether Barrow only liked her because she assisted the two of them. She hoped not; while there were worse fates than being liked for the wrong reasons, she’d grown to enjoy the strange company she kept with the two men.

She walked a while longer, this time in the general direction of the hospital, thinking all the while of what she had seen. Where, she wondered, were the lines for such things as love drawn? For some men to love acceptably, even their fellow man, and others to risk gaol - perhaps it was the depth at which the love ran, which seemed absurd. She held the opinions of many who made such grand decisions very lightly and was, in a slightly giddy way, inclined to disagree for the sake of doing so, though now her convictions found themselves reinforced with her newfound strength.

Nearly as soon as she had decided this, Corporal Barrow’s voice crept up behind her with a really rather innocuous,  “Nurse Crawley?”

Still, Sybil jumped slightly before she turned heel, hand on her breast as if to steady her heart. “Oh, Corporal, you frightened me,” she said, with a little laugh. Barrow smiled tightly in return; he still had his guiding grip on Courtenay’s arm, though when Sybil noticed, he dropped it. Courtenay turned to him with an expression almost blank but for a distant sort of displeasure.

“Were you - have you been looking for us?” Barrow asked, his voice wound tightly with discomfort.

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. I came out to take the air,” she said, smiling. At this, his expression eased slightly and Sybil breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Evening, Lieutenant.”

“Nurse Crawley,” Courtenay responded, ducking his head politely in the direction of her voice. “It’s very fine, isn’t it?”

Sybil’s heart gave a little leap of pleasure; she’d never heard Courtenay speak of anything in positive terms. She grinned at Barrow, briefly, before she replied enthusiastically, “Oh, yes. It’s the finest yet this year,  I think.”

“I think it may be,” Barrow said.

“I almost feel,” Courtenay began - and let the beginning linger for nearly a minute. Barrow took his arm again, as though to lead him away, but the tale restarted. “When Jack and I were young, we used to sometimes sneak out of the house on nights like this to play at adventuring. In the garden we could see by the light of the stars, but we preferred to play in the woods. And with the trees, we could never see anything. Black as pitch. Jack convinced himself that there were goblins in the dark come to steal him away, so he would always run out ahead of me, before I could catch up with him. I teased him mercilessly, though,” he said, the faintest tugging of a smile ghosting over his lips. “What do the stars look like tonight?”

The question was so simple, yet perfectly exemplifying the problem Courtenay had. Facts of his life had vanished, his quiet pleasures had faded like like so many sympathetic stars on behalf of the fallen. Sybil felt her voice sticking in her throat, but Barrow spoke before she attempted to.

“I think they’re all hung out tonight. Sir,” he added, after a moment. Sybil glanced upward for the first time in the men’s presence and saw as though for the first time the utter ease of their brilliance, their awesome silent existence which did so much to make men wonder, wish; it was suddenly the most glorious sight she had seen.

“Can you see by them?” Courtenay asked. His voice had become threadbare at the question, a worn thing that made Sybil’s chest tighten. She looked down to see Barrow’s jaw tightening. She doubted his eyes had moved from Courtenay, who had tilted his head back as though to see the sky.

After a moment, she realised that Barrow was not going to respond; nor could she,not  to that question. After a moment, in a sort of desperation to draw Courtenay from his unhappy revery, she cleared her throat and asked, “What did the sky look like when you were a boy, Lieutenant?”

“ Like nothing else. It was,” he said, and there was a dangerous catch in his voice which seemed to force him into silence once more. He brought his head level, wearing an almost alarmingly neutral mask, and turned his head in Barrow’s direction. His breath was coming erratically, so when he spoke it was a sort of monotonous gasp rather than a request, “I’d like to go back inside now.”

“Goodnight, Lieutenant,”  she bade.

“ Nurse Crawley,”  he said again, repeating his nod.

“Do get some sleep, Corporal. I know you must be on in the morning,” Sybil said, smiling kindly at him. Something she couldn’t entirely read flickered across his face for a brief moment, something that softened his face and made him look terribly young - yet only for a blink. He gave her a smile that seemed unsure whether it was genuine.

“Goodnight, Nurse Crawley.”

Sybil watched two make their way in the direction of the hospital, hearing the soft indistinguishable hum of voices as they went on. She was, suddenly. incredibly glad that they had found one another; her newfound strength supplying a decision with fortitude. There seemed a great chasm of grief and depression in Courtenay, something which she was hideously ill-equipped to deal with. Sybil had experiences her own private sorrows, but they seemed paltry and embarrassing to mention against the men’s experiences of war. All of her horror had come by proxy of the soldiers whom she treated;  even that, sometimes, was quite enough to leave a sort of weight on her chest for a time. The weight of the dead soldiers’ spirits, she had thought once, romantically; now, she saw it as just an exhaustion against the constant barrage of men, boys reduced to earth.

If nothing else, Courtenay and Barrow shared that commonality; undoubtedly that was the sort of thing which forged the love of which she had been told of by the nurse. But she thought, too, that perhaps they went beyond that; the look on Barrow’s face as he watched Courtenay was not the jovial camaraderie the begat that sort of love. It was the look of a pain running deeper than one’s own body, but one that ran through the heart of a love.

Sybil saw them ahead of her, their silhouettes just beginning to blot into the night for distance. She saw in them something which seemed to speak to her of life found in men’s hearts, even in these darkest times.


End file.
